Another theme in Tate’s essay, having outlined the conceptual context of Dickinson’s place as a poet, is his understanding of her cognitive processes as they pertain to achieving an accurate understanding of her poetry as a reader.  He says of her, “She lacks almost radically the power to seize upon and understand abstractions for their own sake; she does not separate them from the sensuous illuminations that she is so marvelously adept at; like Donne, she perceives abstraction and thinks sensation.

Stars! What a phrase – “perceives abstraction and thinks sensation”.

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I’ve been thinking about the Tate essay all day. It’s not so much what he says but the implications of his essay and how these implications fit with other pieces of knowledge that I have acquired elsewhere.  What he does is simple really. He places Dickinson in her conceptual context. He outlines the cognitive transition that occurs as a consequence of the end of the Puritan theocracy and the rise of industrial life.

Where the old-fashioned puritans got together on a rigid doctrine, and could thus be individualists in manners, the nineteenth-century New Englander, lacking a genuine religious center, began to be a social conformist. The common idea of the Redemption, for example, was replaced by the conformist idea of respectability among neighbors whose spiritual disorder, not very evident at the surface, was becoming acute. A great idea was breaking up, and society was moving toward external uniformity, which is usually the measure of the spiritual sterility inside.

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